Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an injection molding system.
Description of the Related Art
In a known method for determining the quality (defective or non-defective) of molded articles in molding by an injection molding machine, physical quantities related to the molding are measured directly or indirectly during the molding. In the method for direct measurement, physical quantities of the molded articles, such as the masses and sizes of the molded articles, are measured. In the method for indirect measurement, physical quantities such as pressures (resin pressure, etc.), positions (injection screw position, etc.), speeds (injection screw speed, etc.), and temperatures (injection cylinder and mold temperatures, etc.) are measured. It is also known that images of the molded articles are acquired by an image acquisition means such as a camera and stored in a storage means.
For the acquisition of molded article images, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-175619 discloses a technique that provides measured values detected by a detector attached to a molding machine and an image pickup device configured to acquire images of molded articles molded by the molding machine. If the measured values when the molding machine molds non-detective articles are within tolerances, according to this technique, the measured values and/or set values and the molded article images acquired by the image pickup device are stored in a database and displayed.
Basically, in the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-175619, molded article image data is stored for traceability of the molded articles. An image of molded article is captured during conforming product molding along with measured values of the molded article in order to investigate in detail the cause of the failure if a manufactured molded article itself or a final product that uses it as a conforming product is subject to a problem such as failure.
Thus, an image of each molded conforming product is captured to facilitate quality control of molded articles. If the number of molding cycles increases, therefore, the capacity of a storage means for storing the molded article image data is expected to cover the increase. Although this problem may be solved by increasing the storage capacity of the storage means as required, another problem may sometimes occur that the cost of the storage means increases correspondingly.